Nexus Earth Newsletter August 2018

It’s been a busy month as we’ve been preparing for launches both near and far. As we reflect on our vision and evolution it’s important to revisit our values. We have a renewed focus on getting back to our roots: decentralization, connection, and code. In order to embrace these roots, we are focusing in and reformatting the 2018 Nexus Conference with an emphasis on education, networking, code, and connection. This revised conference strategy will ensure that the conference is highly productive in advancing our code and subsequent use cases.

Our collective travels over the month have engaged our community in London, identified new potential partners in Europe, solicited insights from the IETF, and furthered our existing partnership with SingularityNET. The core of Nexus is connecting with humanity and we look forward to sharing some of these connections and partnerships in the near future. Please join us at our 2018 Nexus Conference!

Nexus Wallet Development Update

The new Nexus Wallet is officially in alpha! Join us for the journey as we get closer to the big reveal:

Satellite Update from “Satellite Guy” Phil Swazey

The NXS1 cube satellite (cubesat) is progressing well towards its March 2019 goal date. Vector’s estimated launch date has changed from October 2018 to March 2019. All of the satellite components have been procured and assembled as a flight engineering model, pictured below. The engineering model of the satellite is now undergoing integration, verification, and validation testing to verify that the components are all operating up to specifications. Once the integration testing is complete the flight model of the satellite will be assembled and placed in a vacuum chamber for further testing to simulate the space environment. Upon completion of testing the satellite will be packaged and transported to the United States from the manufacturer’s (Space Inventor) facility in Denmark .

Nexus has completed the process of identifying all of the components for the building of a ground station to communicate with the satellite once it is in its operational orbit. Approval for the funding of the ground station is currently underway. The ground station will become a key component for the operations and maintenance of the NXS1 as well as the NXS2 satellites.

The satellite components in assembly

Nexus: Coming Back to Our Roots

Decentralization and connection: the two evolutionary pillars that have sprung up from the blockchain revolution.

They represent the free flow of energy through consciousness: the transfer of information between humans, a transfer of data between machines, the relation of events, and the movements of Nature. Everything in the Universe is interconnected. We strive to find acceptance and to be a part of the flow, to feel at home wherever we go, to get the things that nurture our mind, body, and soul.

This is the direction humanity is moving in and it is clearly seen within the emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. Originally created by a group of pioneers, the technology was built and given to humanity to grow and develop. We believe in the vision of people coming together with their individual skills and talents to collaborate and be a part of something bigger than themselves.

The Nexus community is at the forefront of this movement. Full of passion, curiosity and a keen sense of justice, we are constantly searching for better ways to connect. Yet no journey is without its challenges and lately we have struggled to connect while staying decentralized. Building new systems and structures requires experimentation, drive and collaboration, but it is easy to default to hierarchies and give away our power because that is what humanity has been taught to accept for centuries. That is not the way any longer!

We are free and we are powerful. We all see a variation of a new world where no one is boxed into systems that take away our voice or tell us that our creative spirit is not aligned with some corporate agenda. Self-expression and spontaneous self-organization is at the core of the Nexus philosophy and that is the way forward.

In that spirit, The US Nexus Embassy will be going through a lot of changes in the next few months and focusing on becoming community-centric once again; the root of the blockchain decentralization movement. We are also restarting up our Nexus bounty program. For all those who want to be involved and come up with creative projects, please join our communities on Telegram and Slack. All writers, artists, developers, meme masters, and translators are welcome!

As we collect ideas and suggestions, this incentive program will continue to evolve.

Nexus Conference 2018 Update

In the interest of realigning with our core values, getting back to our code development and community roots, Nexus is evolving the 2018 Nexus Conference to support our overall refocus efforts. We are focusing in on accommodating 300 attendees for a more intimate networking and educational event with increased focus on new code demonstrations including LISP integration and advanced contracting. We will continue to feature many of our amazing speakers sharing insights into the future of technology, with an increased focus on releasing the current state of our code, and progress to create a distributed internet in space. With less overhead and more focus, we can introduce new concepts to help build out those core values: enter Nexus working groups.

An Introduction to Nexus Working groups:

Individuals are invited to come together in Scottsdale to collaborate in the development of the Nexus stack via Nexus working groups. Once the working groups meet in person they will continue their communication and build-out through online interaction. Nexus working groups will be modeled after those of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Those that participate will have the opportunity to build out the model for how the working groups will operate. The future vision of working groups at Nexus is to have them align and build on a range of topics. If you would like to collaborate in building out the Nexus stack via working groups, or learn more about them, please join us at the 2018 Nexus Conference! Working groups will take place on Friday, September 21st. For more information on Nexus groups you can also join our telegram channel

Colin, Brian, and Dino at IETF Montreal

Colin Cantrell, Brian Smith, and Dino Farinacci (Lispers.net) attended the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Montreal, Canada, in mid July. The IETF meets three times per year, bringing together pioneers of the internet to develop protocols. Dino has been attending IETF for many years, while this was Colin’s second visit and Brian’s first. Hot topics at the meeting included how to scale blockchain, how the IETF could help crypto-currency designers, and how overlays can help distributed ledgers.

Brian and Dino attended the Sunday night tutorial on ILNP (an alternate way to do locator/ID separation for LISP), and found it useful to compare the pros and cons between ILNP and LISP. Both Colin and Dino presented at the LISP Working Group. Dino presented the ‘draft-farinacci-lisp-telemetry’ draft that Tritium will use to get more underlay measurements of the network when selecting peers. Additionally, he presented an update to ‘draft-farinacci-lisp-ecdsa-auth’ which is being used in IoT environments. Colin gave an update on ‘draft-farinacci-lisp-decent’ (a design for a decentralized mapping system) and shared some new ideas about how a pull-based mapping system could be used by doing algorithmic mapping from an EID (end-point ID) being registered/requested to the map-servers that will be used to shard the database. Additionally, Colin presented high-level ideas on how the DLT can use LISP crypto-EIDs as well as how LISP could use the DLT to validate mappings and store EID allocations. Good feedback was received on the presentations including lots of questions. Updates to all specs presented will follow and action items were put in place to present at the fall IETF in Bangkok.

Colin and Alex visit SingularityNET in Hong Kong

Colin, Alex, and Jules met with Ben Georterzel of SingularityNET to thoroughly explain the scalable technology of LISP and the 3DC. The developers of SingularityNET and Nexus will first collaborate on the research and development of reputation systems, which are imperative to the security of the Nexus Earth network and to the future decentralized marketplace for Artificial Intelligence. Nexus also envisions that different reputation systems could be built to suit the requirements of specific community and commercial applications, to serve resource sharing ventures that require data to be verified by an immutable consensus mechanism. The teams discussed many topics, including how AI could be employed as agents to detect abnormal behavior of nodes on the Nexus network, i.e. the creation of numerous signature chains for the purpose of making an attack.

Team Hire: Front-End Software Engineer

Demorio (Demo) Fluker joined the Nexus development team in July. He has always been fascinated with the inner workings and compositions of things. He started with PC building and quickly escalated to building applications and websites. With the decision to finally turn that fascination into a career, he attended Woz U, graduating in 2018 as a certified web developer. Demo aims to bring his creativity, talent, and positive energy to Nexus as a front-end software engineer. In his spare time, Demo enjoys producing instrumentals and songs in his home studio.

Community Contributions

Nexus Prime GPU Miner (v1.0) Released

One of the most fascinating things about the Nexus blockchain is that it incorporates three different channels to validate data: a proof-of-stake, a hashing proof-of-work, and a prime proof-of-work channel. For over a year, our community has tried to solve a dilemma with the prime channel: our previous miners were too inefficient to compete with a monopolizing force. Now, thanks to Jack McGowen (@Blackjack) and Nexus Lover’s (@nobody) guidance, we have taken a crucial step in decentralizing the prime channel.

At the beginning of July, Colin, Alex, Scott, Brian, and Ajay met with some of the European Nexus community in London, organized by Jules (@jules). Many Polish members of the Nexus Community joined in, among others. The team then spent a week meeting with businesses in London working on new development opportunities and use cases, which will be announced in the near future.

Thanks to our community for continuing to evolve and challenge Nexus to be its best so that we can have the biggest positive impact, via this technology, possible. We look forward to getting back to our roots with all of you and refocusing our mission.

Lastly, we are very much looking forward to seeing you in Scottsdale next month at The Nexus Conference. This valuable exchange will provide many opportunities to expand our horizons and to personally interact to build the future together. See you there!